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Book Review: 'The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke' by David Bromwich

Long disturbed by the government's abuse of power, Burke also came to see that a crowd might become as tyrannical as a king.

By

William Anthony Hay

June 1, 2014 6:17 p.m. ET

'When a public man writes," Richard Shackleton remarked in 1790, "people generally divide in their declared opinions not according to the merit of the work, but the prejudices which they have conceived concerning the man." Over the years, the vast literature on Shackleton's friend Edmund Burke (1729-97) shows how easily a writer can be lost amid the debate over his ideas and the "prejudices" they inspire.

In "The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke," David Bromwich sets aside the conventional...